I've just released v1.8.0 of Pure Blog , which was the final big feature I wanted to add 1 . At this point, Pure Blog does all the things I would want a useful CMS to do, such as: Storing content in plain markdown, just like an SSG. Easy theme customisations . Hooks for doing clever things when something happens. Data files so I can loop through data to produce pages where I don't have to duplicate effort, like on my blogroll . A couple of simple shortcodes to make my life eas...

Turing Award winner and former Oxford professor  Tony Hoare passed away last Thursday at the age of 92. Hoare is famous for quicksort, ALGOL, Hoare logic and so much more. Jim Miles gives his personal reflections. Jill Hoare, Tony Hoare, Jim Miles. Cambridge, 7 September 2021 Last Thursday (5th March 2026), Tony Hoare passed away, at the age of 92. He made many important contributions to Computer Science, which go well beyond just the one for which most Maths/CompSci undergraduates might know ...

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. Neale Donald Walsch I’m lucky that I have a job where I can work remotely as it allows me to live in a small community where there are no tech jobs anywhere close. It does require me to travel a few weeks per year to the office but I don’t mind that much as I appreciate minor dozes of socializing occasionally. I recently spent five nights on a trip with only a single backpack and it was a surprisingly great experience. How I used...

A recurring concern I've seen regarding LLMs for programming is that they will push our technology choices towards the tools that are best represented in their training data, making it harder for new, better tools to break through the noise. This was certainly the case a couple of years ago, when asking models for help with Python or JavaScript appeared to give much better results than questions about less widely used languages. With the latest models running in good coding agent harnesses...

Hello, I’m back for round three of my social media protocol comparisons. I wrote v2 because of some mistakes on my part, although it’s been two years since writing it, and it’s become a bit out of date. It’s also a bit long, with a bunch of explainers and clutter right at the start of it, so for this round, I figured I’d get things up to date while shortening the text (or at least moving ramblings to footnotes) and move a lot of the explainers to the end. Hello, I’m back for round t...

Sluishuis, Amsterdam, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing Thanks to California’s Prop 13, which limits annual property tax increases to 2% over the most recent sales prices, a very large (and increasing) fraction of homes in California are transferred through inheritance. “About 18%...

Have you heard that the age of hyper-personal software is upon us? Typically what people mean is that agentic AI allows the creation of simple and small software built by individuals, often not super technical individuals, to solve a personal problem. As a result, we will see this explosion of software and the death of SaaS. Naysayers point to the lack of many new software projects being launched as proof that agentic AI is all hype. It’s not hype. It’s just that much of this software ...

I have been working on a few new features for Artemis , the calm web reader I maintain. You can read a summary of what’s new below. Organise subscriptions with folders You can now create folders in Artemis. This feature is designed to help you organise websites you follow into separate pages in your reader. To add an author to a folder, go to the Edit page for an author, then scroll down to the “Folder” option: Set a name for the folder to which you want to add the author. Then, save your...

At the dawn of complex life, evolution created a container for DNA, its most treasured item. A few billion years later, 20th-century microscopists looked at this container — the nucleus — up close and saw that it was covered in tiny openings. At the time, they didn’t know what to make of these structures, but as microscopy improved, something grand came into focus: what we now call “nuclear pore… Source At the dawn of complex life, evolution created a container for DNA, its most tre...

Archbot flagged a "blocker" on a PR. It cited the diff, built a plausible chain of reasoning, and suggested a fix. It was completely wrong. Not "LLMs are sometimes wrong" wrong — more like convincing enough that a senior engineer spent 20 minutes disproving it . The missing detail wasn't subtle. It was a guard clause sitting in a helper two files away. Archbot just didn't have that file. That failure mode wasn't a prompt problem. It was a context problem . So I stopped trying to pr...

Suppose that you have a record of your sales per day. You might want to get a running record where, for each day, you are told how many sales you have made since the start of the year. day sales per day running sales 1 10$ 10 $ 2 15$ 25 $ 3 5$ 30 $ Such an operation is called a prefix sum or a scan. Implementing it in C is not difficult. It is a simple loop. for ( size_t i = 1 ; i data [ 1 ] -> data [ 2 ] -> .....

Concept image showing how Lunar Trailblazer’s remote sensing data was to distinguish between lunar water in the form of ice crystals versus mineral-bound states. Image: Jasper Miura / Lockheed Martin Joe Palca of NPR has reported that the NASA-funded  Lunar Trailblazer  spacecraft, which was lost shortly after its February 2025 launch , failed because its solar panels were pointing perfectly away from the Sun. This chiefly happened because a) the spacecraft vendor Lockheed Martin did n...

I bought a cheap Chinese thermostat to control an infrared heating panel in my office. It ticked all the boxes except one: it's a Tuya device which requires a cloud connection. That's a big no-no for me. So I ripped it apart, soldered some leads onto the PCB and flashed ESPHome onto it. Here's how that went. I bought a cheap Chinese thermostat to control an infrared heating panel in my office. It ticked all the boxes except one: it's a Tuya device w...

A couple of weeks ago, I used Claude to vibe code three formative assessment widgets to use in Jupyter and Marimo notebooks. It took less than two hours to get them working, and another 15 minutes to build a fourth. Given how rusty my JavaScript is, and how little I know about the AnyWidget protocol, I believe it would have taken at least a couple of frustrating days to write them by hand. I only have a high-level understanding of how they work (mumble mumble traitlets mumble mumble), but since ...

Yes, you’re right AI slop is ruining the internet . Given half a chance AI will delete your inbox or worse (even if you work in Safety and Alignment at Meta): Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb. pic.twitter.com/XAxyRwPJ5R — Summer Yue (@summeryue0) February 23, 2026 Low-effort AI cont...

I've been a reluctant Bank of America customer for over a decade. My parents chose BofA, so I chose BofA. Migrating to Chase or Wells Fargo is more of the same -- not worth the switching cost . Am I really a "customer" when they charge -0.01% interest to hold my money? BofA is clunky . Their physical branches seem simultaneously overstaffed and understaffed. Everybody there is cordial yet confused. I would never visit their physical locations if their app worked, but alas, their app ...

I’ll be having one of those birthdays this year I feel like should be a big deal, but I suspect will feel like any other. That’s the hope, at least. More than anything, I feel lucky (and frankly privileged) to be around. Around… And then it hit me. Reel to reel tape machines. Around, and around, and around. On a 7-inch reel, to another 7-inch reel. Or maybe 10-inch. Or something more portable. Mesmerising. High fidelity. A complex piece of kit blending engineering and art. Uh oh. ...

I'm on medical leave recovering from surgery . Before I went under, I wanted to ship one thing I'd been failing to build for months: a sponsor panel at sponsors.xeiaso.net . Previous attempts kept dying in the GraphQL swamp. This time I vibe coded it — pointed agent teams at the problem with prepared skills and let them generate the gnarly code I couldn't write myself. And it works. The GraphQL swamp Go and GraphQL are oil and water. I've held this opinion for y...

Four full weeks of paying more attention to phone screen time are behind us, and it’s time for some closing thoughts on this experiment. But first, a quick recap of how the final week went. The average was slightly higher than the previous 3 weeks, and that was mainly due to what happened on Tuesday and Friday, which, as you can see from the weekly recap, saw higher-than-usual phone usage. On Tuesday, I passed 1 hour of screen time for the first time since the start of this experimen...

I didn’t start out as a designer. I started out as a frontend developer. I cared about the craft and spent a lot of time trying to master HTML, CSS, JavaScript and accessibility. Over time, I learned how these technologies affected UX, so as a dev, I started to suggest design changes to improve usability and accessibility. But most of the designers I worked with ignored my suggestions. Years later I transitioned to design. I tried to hide my engineering past because I was worried oth...

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. A sentence that I never really liked, and what is happening with AI, about software projects reimplementations, shows all the limits of such an idea. Many people are protesting the fairness of rewriting existing projects using AI. But, a good portion of such people, during the 90s, were already in the field: they followed the final part (started in the ‘80s) of the deeds of Richard Stallman, when he and his followers were reimpleme...

A lot of the time, the software I write boils down to three phases: parse some input, run it through a state machine, and persist the result. In this kind of code, you spend a lot of time knitting your error path, hoping that it’d be easier to find the root cause during an incident. This raises the following questions: When to fmt.Errorf("doing X: %w", err) When to use %v instead of %w When to just return err There’s no consensus, and the answer changes depending on the kind...

After seeing Oliver Ettlin's 39C3 presentation Excuse me, what precise time is It? , I wanted to replicate the PTP ( Precision Time Protocol ) clock he used live to demonstrate PTP clock sync: I pinged him on LinkedIn inquiring about the build (I wasn't the only one!), and shortly thereafter, he published Gemini2350/ptp-wallclock , a repository with rough instructions for the build, and his C++ application to display PTP time (if available on the network) on a set of two LED matrix disp...